7 October, 2026 – Waiheke Island, New Zealand – A new work of literary autofiction, People Like You, asks whether we can truly choose who we are, or whether identity is spun, minute and deliberate, by family, station, migration and the expectations of others. Moving from childhood through adulthood and into old age, the story follows six women whose lives are threaded by a background hum of shame and guilt. Anxiety stitches their days together, and social performance becomes a practised rhythm that teaches who belongs and who does not.
They rehearse conversations, conceal origins and learn to read rooms for signs of welcome or exclusion. One woman’s study of group-analytic theory raises the question of how unconscious patterns travel through groups – how individual memories, assumptions and experiences feed collective behaviour. Elsewhere, psychotherapy and symbolic dreams frame attachment, inherited expectations and the fear of belonging without surrendering part of the self.
Throughout, the recurring language of “people like us” and “people like them” draws the boundaries of social identity. Those lines are sometimes defied, sometimes absorbed and often reproduced by the very people attempting to escape them.
THE QUESTION AT THE CENTRE OF THE STORY:
At its heart lies a question that resists a resolution. Is genuine reinvention possible, and if so, can it be done without confronting, rather than simply outrunning, an earlier version of the self. Its characters construct new identities in response to changing circumstances, while discovering that distance from the past does not remove the reach of its tentacles.
These questions are relevant to experiences of social mobility, migration, and movement between communities, where adaptation to a new environment can coexist with an unresolved relationship to an earlier one. Rather than presenting a simple argument about such transitions, the book dramatises their emotional and psychological complexity.
People Like You will interest readers drawn to psychologically informed, literary autofiction that probes how class and belonging shape memory and identity, and how early experience never quite lets go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
I was born in 1976, in former Czechoslovakia. Discontented with my world shaping in Orwell’s 1984 vision, I left in 1995, eventually settling in London. I learned English as an au-pair and later completed my legal qualifications while a trainee in a city law firm. My academic journey continued with Masters with Merit in Classical History and later, in Social Sciences. I am a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. I am a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist, professionally active in London, UK and in New Zealand.
Book Name: People Like You
Author Name: Monika Killeen
ISBN Number: 979-8951966087
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